CHRIS RICE COOPER is a newspaper writer, feature stories writer, poet, fiction writer, photographer, and painter. She maintains a blog at https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com. She has a Bachelor's in Criminal Justice and completed all of her poetry and fiction workshops required for her Master’s in Creative Writing with a focus on poetry. She, her husband Wayne, sons Nicholas and Caleb, cats Nation and Alaska reside in the St. Louis area.

(more
information at the Photo Description and Copyright Page at the bottom)

Quraysh
Ali Lansana

The
Storytelling Poet

and
They
Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems

In Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained slave owner Calvin
Candie (portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio) forces his slaves to fight against each
other- to the death.One slave, the Mandingo
fighter D’Artagnans, no longer wants to fight, so he tries to escape, only to
find himself at the bottom of a tree, pleading with his Master Candi to not
make him fight anymore.

The brutal Candi responds by ordering his two vicious
dogs to literally tear apart and kill D’Artagnans, which they do with their
jaws, claws, blood gushing out, the slave’s cries and screams compelling.

Prolific poet Quraysh Ali Lansana depicts the same
evils of slavery in his persona book of poems They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman
Poems, in the voices of Tubman herself, her husband John, a young boy
named Isaiah, and a dog.

Negro dog

thoughts on the matter of runaways

don’t mind showing my teeth

means i get to work

my legs and savor the hunk of meat

after i track em down

don’t even see a coon

unless i’m trainin or chasin

master stick an old shirt or scrap

under my snout and i’m gone

he doesn’t let me out

for anything else i live to run

this cage makes me crazy

leaves my blood funny

coons really aren’t hard ta catch

they have to sleep sometime

Page 23 from They
Shall Run Harriet Tubman Poems

Copyright granted by Quraysh
Ali Lansana

“Cuban
blood hounds were used to track runaway African Americans.They were tall and long and kept in cages too
small for their bodies so they were always uncomfortable and it made them
angrier.

I imagined this dog was
edgy.It was only released to train for
a hunt or on a hunt for an African American.It was crazy with the notion of being free from his cage, which made him
want to run, to stretch his legs. I imagined that the dog’s voice would be very
brief, very staccato, very short utterances, (with) a balance of consonants and
mutes to give this dog a very guttural urgency. The dog would be matter of fact:“I’m crazy in this cage, and as soon as they
let me out, I go crazy to stretch my legs.And I love the reward at the end of it – I love that chunk of meat.’”

In Quraysh’s life, “chunk of meat”
could be a term to describe how he sometimes felt in this world, particularly
in his far right conservative hometown and home state of Enid, Oklahoma, where he
lived in a cramped two-story home with his five older siblings, who made him
aware of the injustices toward black people and who were an example to him of
how they were to respond to this injustice – by following the Black Power
Movement.

“My older siblings had Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka poems
taped to the walls of their rooms.I was
saturated in the work of the music of that moment because that is what my
siblings were listening to:Marvin Gaye,
Stevie Wonder – one of my most significant poetic influences- and Earth, Wind
and Fire.”

I
was reared in a household that paid attention to social dynamics and social
constructs.Just by watching my siblings
and the environment of our household I became very aware that I was different,
by being a child of color.”

By the time Quraysh was five years old,
he understood the social constructs though he perhaps could not voice it at
that age.He met his best friend, Zack, a
full-blooded Cherokee Indian, in kindergarten, and the two boys were close
friends all the way until the 5th grade.

“He didn’t like to watch
westerns.So I’m not going to watch
westerns.He understood because that’s a
direct element of his cultural upbringing.If I were a full-blooded Cherokee I would understand why we don’t watch westerns
(which) are all about mass conquest, mass genocide.I’m only one quarter
Cherokee.I didn’t understand all of that
until middle school, but I was aware and sensitive to the dynamics of it at five
years of age.”

Quraysh, his older brother, and four older
sisters were reared in the African Methodist Episcopalian Church.

“We
were the choir, one of my aunties was the music director, another aunt played
the piano, one auntie became pastor of the church for quite some time, and my
cousins and I did the offering.The
first time I ever presented anything in public was in that church.”

Quraysh experienced his first writing
of poetry when he was introduced to Beowulf in the 8th grade,
which he described as his “most profound
intimate relationship or introduction to poetry.”

He was also introduced to the poets Robert Hayden
and Gwendolyn Brooks (the first black writer to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize
for 1949’s Annie Allen), whom he would later meet in 1990, maintaining a
deep friendship until her death in December of 2000.

While
attending Enid High School he was known as “Dear Abby”, wrote a sports column
for the high school newspaper, and edited a page of student news from the local
elementary schools for the town newspaper.

The movie All The President’s Men made a huge
impression on him, and was eventually what led him to major in journalism at the
University of Oklahoma.

During his sophomore year he started writing
poetry consistently “because it was a way
for me to yell on a piece of paper and not yell at a human.”

That all changed when he started
working for KWTV, Channel 9, a CBS affiliate in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma from
the summer of 1987 until Thanksgiving of 1988.

“I
was on my way to Northern Florida to take a job as a news director at a radio
station in a small town near the swamps (where) I was to live in a trailer park
for a couple of months. The CBS
affiliate called me – my car was packed – and they called me in that night for
an emergency interview and offered me the job.”

Quraysh
was thrilled, believing in ethical journalism as a public trust – giving the
viewer the facts and allowing the individual to make his or her own interpretation.

“When
I got into the box of channel 9 I learned about spin, and we were by far the
best news operation in the city at the time.The general manager would get on the air for three minutes and would
rant about something.Edward Gaylord,
owner of The Daily Oklahoman, would
use the front page as a platform to yell back.

Everyday I went to that
job I learned what local T.V. news is about – not being very kind to black
people and people of color, and perpetuating fear at a local level.”

Perhaps the most tormenting and
racially motivated moment of his career in this tiny glass box, was when he,
one of only two black men working on the news side of the company, was assigned
by the Managing Editor the task to greet and escort the Grand Imperial Wizard
of the KKK to the newsroom where he and the General Manager were to have a meeting.

“My
Managing Editor was a good guy with a great journalism mind.I liked him a lot.I knew he was attempting to make a
statement:a black young employee to
greet this wizard to make the statement that some of us do not condone what you
are, but the Managing Editor didn’t even ask me how I felt about this chore.I walk up to the front, and I cannot believe
I have to do this.I greeted him, he
walked behind me, and I had to open the door and say, “I’m here to welcome you
to the newsroom and to channel nine.”And I imagine what he was thinking.I opened the door for him and said, ‘Have a seat and they will be with
you.”And that is just one example of
what it was like to be inside that box.”

He was fired in November of 1988, which
in the end, was the best thing that could have happened to him.

“When
I was fired I realized how much of my own beliefs and my own way of seeing the
world I had to suppress in order to do the job.I was completely saturated
in work, and work was related to largely things that I didn’t believe in and
things that made me question my integrity and my belief system.”

He also experienced the realization
that he had not been writing poetry during his time at Channel 9 because he was
working six days a week, 11 hours each day.

“Therefore
I made unhealthy decisions and I didn’t have a moment of breath.When I’m not writing I’m not healthy, I’m not
my best self, and I learned that during that moment.”

The moment he was fired he made poetry
his primary focus and study of his life, and started writing again.In September of 1989, with just two suitcases,
a folder of poems, and $25, Quraysh moved to Chicago, where he lived with his
previous college roommate Tom Booker (http://www.theinstitutiontheater.com/about),
a comedian for Annoyance Theater.

He eventually moved into his own apartment on Cornelia
Street in Wrigleyville, where he continued to write poems.He then moved to Wicker Park, a neighborhood saturated
with the arts.

While he earned his living working at a
“document sweatshop” (a large litigation firm handling the paperwork for
insurance companies during the national HMO scandals of the early 1990’s), he
immersed himself in the local poetry scene, performing with the poetry groups Brothers in Verse and The FunkyWordsmyths.He gave his first poetry reading in 1991
at the bar Borderline.His second poetry
reading was even more special, at Estelle’s, where he met his colleague, best
friend, and great poet Christopher Stewart.

In 1990, he converted to Islam and
officially changed his name from Ron Myles to Quraysh Ali Myles.

When he and his wife, Emily married on July 25, 1996
their Babalawo gave the couple the last name Lansana, which means “storyteller”
in Mende, a people and language rooted
in Sierre Leone.

“I
was a practicing Muslim from 1990 to 1999.Islam, for me, is what the military can be and has been for some young
men, which was community, discipline, focus, and maturation.My move to Islam was driven by faith,
community, and it was also political.”

During those nine to ten years being a
practicing Muslim, Quraysh studied the continent of Africa and its people and
learned that the Jihads were as brutal as the Christian’s colonialism and
crusades when it came to forcing conversion.He also realized that he was now interested in how people honored their
ancestors and God in ways that are indigenous to Africa.

“I
am no longer a practicing Muslim but Islam informs a great deal of who I am,
but because I respect it so much and I do not follow it to the letter I do not
call myself Muslim.I have studied
Buddhism, Rastafari, was raised Christian and all of those paths have formed
who I am.All of those paths are how I
see and move through the world.”

One
of those African descendants is Harriet Tubman, who is believed to have
descended from the African tribe Ashanti, who fought for their own independence
and claimed their own land.Quraysh
remembered her from his school years when they would display images of her on
the school’s wall during February, Black History Month.

In 1999, while still living in Chicago,
Quraysh attended a friend’s going away party and had a conversation with
storyteller, performer and family member Glenda Zahra Baker, who was also at
the party.

“She
reminded me that Tubman was about 12 or 13 when she received that blow to the
head attempting to come between an overseer and a young African boy named Jim,
who tried to flee the plantation.The
overseer demanded Harriet whip Jim as a form of punishment and mental
superiority.Harriet refused.The overseer got mad and picked up a fence post
and threw it at the boy.Harriet came
between Jim and the fence post and took the blow to the head.

Whenever you see images
of Harriet you’ll see that her forehead protrudes a bit and the bridge of her
nose and the lower part of her face is concave and pushed in and that’s from
that blow.

She was bedridden
between four to six months due to the blow, and while she was bedridden the
overseer tried to sell her and nobody would take her.She used to be a house slave and now she was
too ugly for the house. Folks thought
she wasn’t worth anything.

When she recovered from
that blow she could work as long and as hard as any man in the field, which is
where she was put.

Because of that blow she
experienced what she called sleep or blackness – narcolepsy - for the rest of
her life.When she was in her narcoleptic
sleep Zahra and I theorized that was when she received her guidance from the
spirit world, from the ancestors.

Harriet was a super
Christian, always in prayer, always in a constant conversation with God, and,
in some ways I always felt that is why she had this bubble of protection around
her and did the things she did.

I went home from that
party and wrote “the leaving”, imagining what it might have felt like to have
worked in the field for 14 hours in the July heat and you go back to the slave
quarters and eat bacon grease and corn mush and your mom tells you this woman
they call Moses is coming to free you but you must go alone.

To know what it must have felt like to an
eight or nine year old boy to leave your mom in the middle of the night.You’re crying, she’s crying, and this mean
ugly woman with a bandana on her head and a rifle in her bag comes out of this
clearing and picks you up off the ground away from Mama with one arm and says,
“Come on boy, let’s go.”

And you wander
into the night following this woman with a number of people you do not know
(because) you do not know how to count.You follow this woman and you cross the river, and you follow the same
steps as the person preceding you so you minimize the wake and the ripple of
the water and you get to the other side of the river.You don’t know where you are; you are cold;
you are wet; and you are scared.The
person who came and got you passes out for five minutes or an hour, and can’t
be awakened; she just has to come out of it.Imagine what this must have been like for this child.”

Isaiah

the leaving

my lord she gone

againwe’s
in de middle

of pitch black sky

moon see us only

we praystarin back

from de murky river

thirteen of usi think

nigga runaways crossin

wide water wid no ripple

all cold an shiver

she gone againmy lord

why hereaint de red sea

where she go when she go

Page 13

Copyright
granted by Quraysh Ali Lansana

“the leaving” is the first poem Quraysh
wrote in They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems and is the only poem of
the collection without the benefit of research.

“I
had no idea I would be this hooked and live the next 3 ½ years in the
1800s.When I wrote “the leaving” I knew
this was more than one poem.It was at least
a series.”

In
the spring of 2000, when he was accepted into New York University’s MFA
program, he wanted to send a message with his poetry collection – that Harriet
Tubman was a real human being and not some mythical creature.

“A
part of the work I wanted to make manifest is to take Tubman off the wall in
public school classrooms for 28 days and remind us that she was flesh and blood
and woman and black and that she did incredible things in a time where it was
exceedingly difficult to do anything being a black woman and someone’s property.”

In the summer of 2000, he and his
family moved to Brooklyn for him to attend NYU.He continued writing the Harriet Tubman poems with a pen and a journal, most
of them written at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (http://www.nypl.org/locations/schomburg).

Quraysh’s favorite poems from the collection are
“The Trilogy Poems”:the prose poem
“long way home” in the voice of Harriet Tubman;“faithless” in the voice of John Tubman; and “hole” in the voice of
Harriet Tubman.

“I
call it a trilogy because they actually speak to one another and speak to the
moment in her life and in the book about her and her situation with John, who
did not believe she would ever leave.”

In
2002, Quraysh’s final year at NYU, he enrolled in a poetry workshop under the
former U.S. Poet Laureate and great narrative poet Philip Levine.When he gave Levine his manuscript of 30 to
35 poems to read, he was confident the manuscript was near completion.

“He
said it the only the way Phil could say it: “Q, the persona poems are fine but,
you know, you need to write some narratives.”And I had in my head: ‘That’s what Phil is going to say because Phil is
one of the masters of writing in traditional narrative form and that’s the form
that he champions.’”

It wasn’t until the summer of 2003 that
he realized Levine was right and that something was missing in the
manuscript.That very summer he attended
a Cave Canem Workshop (https://www.cavecanempoets.org),with the
goal of writing narrative poems in order to complete the manuscript.

“With
a whole lot of history books and a laptop and a manuscript, I wrote about 17
poems in the six days at the retreat and majority of them are narrative poems
that flesh out the book.”

Presently he is adjunct faculty at the
School Art Institute of Chicago (http://www.saic.edu); Faculty mentor of the
Red Earth MFA program at Oklahoma City University (http://www.okcu.edu); and engaged in other projects.

“I
turned 50 this past September 13th, (and) I am on the pursuit of
living the life I want to lead.That’s
the goal for all artists, and we have to make sacrifices and compromises to
take care of our responsibilities.I’m
trying to avoid another full time position unless it’s a really good
situation.”

His
top priority is his wife of 18 years, Emily, and their four sons ages 8, 10,
15, and 16.

Other books by Quraysh include the
chapbook cockroach children: corner poems and street psalm by nappyhead
press 1995;

Editor of the two anthologies I Represent
and dream
in yourself, literary works from Chicago’s award-winning youth arts
employment program, Gallery 37, Tia Chucha Press (http://www.tiachucha.org),1995
and 1996;

Drawing
of the Cuban bloodhound Spot.Spot was
one of two Cuban bloodhounds used to guard the POW camp at Andersonville,
Georgia during the Civil War.

Public
Domain

Photo
6

A
plate drawing of Iron gray bloodhounds attacking a runaway slave.

Dated
in the 1800s

Attributor
unknown.

Library
of Congress – Public Domain

Photo
7

Tommie
Smith (center) and John Carlos (right) showing the raised fist on the podium
after the 200m in the 1968 Summer Olympics. Silver medalist Peter Norman from
Australia (left) joins them in wearing Olympic Project for Human Rights
badges." This mural in Newtown, Sydney has been in Leamington Lane for 40
years. When State Rail built the stabling yards across the other side of the
tracks they erected a concrete noise wall that now prevents rail travellers
from seeing the work.

CCBY2.0
License

Photo
8

Drawing
of the Cuban Bloodhound, Spot.Spot was
one of two Cuban Bloodhounds used to guard the POW camp at Andersonville,
Georgia during the Civil War.

Attributor
unknown

Public
Domain

Photo
9

Baraka
addressing the Malcolm X Festival from the Black Dot Stage in San Antonio Park,
Oakland, California while performing with Marcel Diallo and his Electric Church
Band.

American
Indian Boy with Shovel at the Dwight Mission School in Oklahoma

Photo
attributor unknown.

Photo
taken from 1914 to 1953

Burke
Library Archives (Columbia University Libraries) at Union Theological Seminary
in New York

*Images
can only be used for scholarship, teaching, and resource purposes.

Photo
15

Scene
from the 1956 movie, The Searchers, where John Wayne’s character
spends years looking for his niece (portrayed by Natalie Wood), who was taken
by Indians.In this particular scene,
John Wayne and his men have just attacked an Indian community.

Public
Domain

Photo
16

Reverend
Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,
usually called the A.M.E. Church, which is a predominantly African-AmericanMethodist denomination
based in the United States.
It was founded in Pennsylvania, in 1816, from several black Methodist
congregations in the mid-Atlantic area that wanted independence from white
Methodists.

Earliest
known photograph of Harriet Tubman, age 33, and the white child she took care
of.

Photo
taken in 1855?

Public
Domain

Photo
42

Harriet
Tubman

Photo
43 (1) (2) (3) (4) and (5)

The
five images are from an article in SOMERSET STUDIO magazine July/August 2014
issue, pages 40 – 47.
The article PATCHES & PASSAGES:Decoding the Underground Railroad and its artwork is written and created
by Lynne Perrella.http://www.lkperrella.com

Copyright
granted by Lynne Perrella.

Photo
44

Harriet
Tubman

Public Domain

Photo
45

Statue
of Harriet Tubman located at the

Ypsilanti
District Library in Ypsilanti, Michigan on 229 West Michigan Avenue

Artist
Jane DeDecker

Photo
by Dwight Burdette

CCA3.0
Unported.

Photo
4b

Jacket
cover of They Shall Run The Harriet Tubman Poems

Photo
4c

Jacket
cover of They Shall Run The Harriet Tubman Poems

Photo
46

The
New York University seal

Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo
47

Harriet
Tubman in 1911

Public
Domain

Photo
48

The
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture's building at 515 Malcolm X.
Boulevard (Lenox Avenue) was constructed between 1969 and 1980, and opened to
the public in 1978. It was designed by Bond Ryder Associates. A link tot he
Center’s original building, the former 135th Street Branch, was built in 1991,
designed by Davis Brody Bond. The building was renovated in 2007. (Source: 'AIA
Guide to NYC (5th ed.))